Anna Kamieńska
‘Two Darknesses’ selected and translated from the Polish by Tomasz P Krzeszowski and Desmond Graham (Flambard, Newcastle upon Tyne 1994).
Anna Kamieńska (1920-1986) was a prominent member of that particularly distinguished generation of Polish writers who experienced the Second World War as young men and women, many of whom died at the hands of the Nazis. During the war she taught in underground schools in the Lublin region, having studied Education in Warsaw. She continued her studies after the War and subsequently became deeply involved in the literary life of the Polish capital, working on the important monthly magazine Creativity. Her first published poems appeared in 1945 and her last in her Two Darknesses: Selected Poems (1984) from which the poems in this current volume are selected and translated. Her Notebooks appeared posthumously in 1987.
Her work was deeply influenced by the War, the Holocaust, and the suffering of Poland, as well as more personal grief, especially as a result of the early death in 1967 of her husband, Jan Spiewak, also a poet. Kamieńska is undoubtedly a religious poet yet she is also a technically and stylistically adventurous ‘modern’ poet. Although Biblical allusions and aspects of Catholic mysticism pervade her work, there is nothing predictably pietistic about it. She has been called a Catholic Existentialist, and her admiration for the great French ‘patron saint of outsiders’, the unorthodox, Judaeo-Christian mystic Simone Weil who died during the War, is significant. The thirty-five poems in the collection include the major ten-part sequence ‘Job’s Second Happiness’, as well as major poems on Dr Korczak, Edith Stein, Andrei Rublow, the Janów Orchestra and ‘A Short Conversation with Simone Weil’.
Shortly before Kamieńska’s death, which was unexpected, Tomasz Krzeszowski visited her and read her the translations in progress, including the Job poems. She was delighted with the project and gave it her blessing.
Tomasz P Krzeszowski, a lexicographer and poet, was Professor of English at the University of Gdańsk at the time of making these translations, and was subsequently a Professor at the University of Warsaw.
Questions on rights to reproduce the translations should be addressed to Desmond Graham (see ‘Contact’).
Those who carry
Those who carry pianos
to the tenth floor
wardrobes and coffins
an old man with a bundle of wood limps beyond the horizon
a woman with a hump of nettles
a madwoman pushing a pram
full of vodka bottles
they will all be lifted
like a gull’s feather like a dry leaf
like an eggshell a scrap of newspaper
Blessed are those who carry
for they shall be lifted
Prophets
‘All the prophets fell silent’ (ADAM WAŻYK)
We fear the eyes of animals
we don’t trust pure snows
we forget the night sky
is like a glittering ant hill
we can’t address plants and birds by name
our children won’t come across hart and hedgehog running wild
nor the modest forest orchid
we don’t know how to nurse a shoot
to grow into a tree of silence
we don’t greet each other in the street with peace
we don’t cut an overcoat in half
we let the old die in corridors
we don’t trust big letters
we don’t respect the evidence of a stone in a field
we have not seen God
in any burning bush
We have learnt to jam effectively the voice of prophets
it is difficult to recognise them today
they are too old or too young
dried up liked plucked birds
or maybe plump but not resembling even poets
in sandals or shoes on bare feet
in a hat or in the usual halo of death
nobody would give a bent penny for them
and some cannot forgive them a little folly
they speak as though to themselves
they repeat their painful life stories
they always pay more for their bread
they are more solitary than is permitted
They march like stooping letters
over blind cities
they don’t seek salvation for themselves
1976
It’s Funny
What’s it like to be human
asked the bird
I don’t really know
to be imprisoned in one’s skin
but reach for infinity
to be captive to a particle of time
but to touch eternity
to be hopelessly uncertain
and a fool of hope
to be a needle of trust
and a handful of heat
to breathe in air
choke without a word
to be aflame
and have a nest of ashes
to eat bread
and be full up with hunger
to die without love
and to love through death
It’s funny said the bird
flying off into air lightly
